The Internet Democracy Question

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I’ve long been a hard-headed skeptic of the Internet. As a writer, the internet and I share a love-hate relationship, a delicate economic and social tango. I read articles about online writing with a hypocritically raised eyebrow. Pieces such as Michaela Lola’s “When Will Online Writing Get the Respect It Deserves?” and WrittenRoad.com’s “How Important Is Blogging For Your Career As A Travel-Writer?” ponder, to great extent, the need and acceptability of online writing.

But there’s two, distinct, worlds here: writing and the internet/”teh internetz”.

In doing some research, I stumbled across a speech given by Eli M. Noam, Professor of Finance and and director of the Columbia Institute for “Tele-Information”.This speech, entitled “The Future of Telecommunications, The Future of Telecommunications Regulation” is, at best, a boring list of obvious tech generalities. The Speech is peppered with stuff such as:

“…Education and coffee improve things only so much. But machines have much higher limits. And it is here that the microprocessor revolution has its major communication impact. These data machines will be everywhere…Electronic books will download from publishers. Front doors will check in with police departments. Pacemakers will talk to hospitals. Television sets will connect to video servers.”

and

“…the future is always a bit of an inkblot test, into which everyone projects their fantasies, desires, and nightmares. When it comes to the Internet, some see education and democracy. Others see pornography and chaos.”

What makes this speech interesting–and a stark contrast to all of the urban-legend photos of the man who states that the computer of the future will only require a small garage–is that it was made in 1999. Noam looked almost a decade into the future with unnerving accuracy, as in this part:

“…MCI Worldcom’s winning bid for the Federal Government’s FTS 2001 has a per minute price, in a few years, of less than 1 cent per minute. Similarly, for international transmission, new projects will raise capacity was 5.1 Gbps in ’94, 65 Gbps in ’99, and 865 Gbps in 2003 almost a quadrupling every two years. And that’s without the adoption of the next round of innovations in fiber optics. As that happens, international calls become priced at flat rate, near zero. On an architectural level, networks become engineered for data, not voice (note: think Vonage), because data, which is now about 50% of traffic, will be 98% in a few years. Bandwidth becomes a substitute for switches. And with flat pricing, monthly phone bills that itemize calls will probably become unnecessary.”

What he’s saying here is while MCI, Sprint, AT&T, Et. al. were ignoring your complaints about slow dialup internet they were, in fact, making major improvement to places that matter, laying down and expanding the pipework that would ultimately delivering “Two Girls, One Cup” to billions of sick freeloaders, worldwide.

But Noam doesn’t stop at 2008. He goes on to 2020 and identifies key issues that the internet will face in that time. These include Privacy Protection and Intellectual Property Right Protection, further adding to the eeriness that is Noam’s clairvoyance. (note: Napster had only begun in 1999, MySpace wouldn’t start until 2003).

He addresses “monopoly power”, which I feel most succintly addresses what is truly happening to the Internet (and it’s writing) at this point

“…And why should it stop here? Yahoo? AOL? Amazon.com? Are they the next chapters? Why not? Presumably, these companies are trading at such high levels because of investor expectations of abnormally high profits, not because of a competitive return. The economic logic is relatively simple. Development costs are high, marginal costs are low. So there are large economies of scale. Brands are important…The Internet may still have the image of small is beautiful, but the reality is changing fast. 

Now some might object and point out how easy it is to set up a web page (my emphasis). True, but that’s for a narrowband world, and even there less and less so. In a broadband Internet world, Webster will be multimedia, video, with lots of bells and whistles. User expectations will grow. Development cost will zoom, and entry barriers will become much higher, just as they are in movies, newspapers, and major software. And when that happens, some Internet submarkets will become heavily concentrated.”

It’s absolutely eerie how accurate Noam was. What’s more interesting is that he’s a professor of business, not technology. Once the framework was laid down, even the techies couldn’t see the future as well as the entrepreneurs. If there’s a lesson to be taken away from this for writers, it will be found in Noam’s ninth point:

“Content Standards”

It’s easy to get wrapped up in marketing, networking, and the voodoo that is these magical computer boxes. But at the end of the day/week/month/year/career, it is my humble opinion that the good copy will sit in the vat of internet fermentation, slowly rising to the top.

Final thought: Can a blog really be expected to provide an unbiased analysis of the effectiveness of blogs? Once you got to the paragraph that starts with “All the evidence suggests that blogging is pointless…” wouldn’t the writer then just stop, delete the article, and never waste time on the topic again?